Architects DSM Design Group and Marx Development Group have unveiled renderings for an undulating glass tower slated for New York City's Hudson Yards.
The 487-foot tower design differs markedly from previous iterations of the project, which displayed more conventional and monolithic glass skin designs. The latest version of the tower, according to a rendering published by New York YIMBY, features a skinny, undulating body wrapped in canted gridded glass facades. Stacked in two-floor modules, the cuboid tower appears to move as it rises, reflecting the sky and its surroundings in slightly oblique compositions. The lower levels of the building contain a series of protruding double- and triple-height volumes .
New York YIMBY reports that excavation for the project's foundations are well underway and that the structure will eventually contain a 531-room hotel. Additionally, the site reports that the project is due to be completed in the fall of 2022.
In a sense this is a successful building. It fits in well with context—Hudson Yards—yet provides some variation. And it reflects current socio-economic forces and values. That both context and culture are simplistic, narrow, and abstract, and are providing diminishing returns is another matter.
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"Eye-catching"? Just barely! Other than that, bereft of any news value to the legit architectural press.
Best left to lame, heavy-handed "developers & realtrors" news coverage in the future!
yrs,
JB
Has that "salvage yard" mistique ;)
i'm getting old enough to lament the loss of elegance in contemporary american architecture :-(
Why?
better than the other towers at hudson yards. not that its a high bar to pass.
In a sense this is a successful building. It fits in well with context—Hudson Yards—yet provides some variation. And it reflects current socio-economic forces and values. That both context and culture are simplistic, narrow, and abstract, and are providing diminishing returns is another matter.
I agree that it does these things, but in a very blatant, ham-fisted manner. I'd love a little more subtlety.
So much undulating going on these days...
This visually mimicks a future where buildings are constructed out of the ruins and rubble of a previous civilization.
Like buildings built out of the stone stripped off of the pyramids.
Gary, what are the socio-economic values that you think are being reflected in this work?
ban glass and steel.
Looks like some drunk shipyard workers had a bet on how high they could stack empty shipping containers....
Looks like something from Portal.
Erik (et al.)—
The transcendence of speculation, wealth, brand, and status; their total separation from a culture, our history, a city, the rest of us. It is consummate and self-consuming abstraction.
The asset-management team BlackRock signed up to spend $1.25 billion in rent over 20 years. The retail complex will have at least six places where you can spend five figures on a wristwatch.
The architecture has to match, and we've been given a modernism without moment or reflection, of diminishing assumptions, which has to bump or twist itself in some way to keep from disappearing into total and blinding abstraction.
Somehow the DSM tower has to fit in with all this yet at the same time distinguish itself. Why not a fractured tower. Try to imagine something else here. However tasteful and significant, it would stand out like a sore thumb.
The Davidson piece is quite good.
The great promise of Hudson Yards was that a whole new zone of the postindustrial metropolis could be manufactured from scratch without the burdens of a messy past. There were no residents to displace, no favorite bookstores to bulldoze or preservationists to placate. Here was a chance to dream up the metropolis of the future afresh. But the political climate and economic imperatives short-circuited those fantasies and we got a bloated simulacrum instead. That failure to learn from past blunders, or to strive for a more equitable and humane city, constitutes a massive institutionalized failure of imagination decades in the making.
Architecture, like politics and war, springs from a million separate decisions made within the context of vast historical forces, decisions that can seem freer or more meaningful than they really are. At Hudson Yards, the path to the ribbon-cutting followed an inexorable trajectory based on impregnable financial logic. Underutilized space must be reclaimed for its highest and best use. The MTA needed cash. Costs were high, so potential profits had to be too. The most efficient way to finance and engineer the project was to hand it off to a single developer, who was only ever going to build a city as a luxury product. Each decision made the next one essentially foreordained.
This para-Manhattan, raised on a platform and tethered to the real thing by one subway line, has no history, no holdover greasy spoons, no pockets of blight or resident eccentrics — no memories at all.
http://nymag.com/intelligencer...
(My watch barely breaks two figures. It still works.)
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